visionary science ?

We might ask where the theory of evolution came from historically, and also ask why did biologists start to consider it as viable?

I guess the story goes that Charles Darwin was known to hang out with a group of political radicals who would congregate at Parisian cafes in France. They would often party until the wee hours of the morning, drink absinthe, and discuss the latest trends in Atheism. After a long night of absinthe-drinking (and homosexual sex), Darwin awoke the next morning recalling that he had a strange vision the night before. In the vision, he was presented with the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. He later recounted that the theory was described to him by a strange being he called the "Scorpion Lady". After relaying his vision to the other radicals, Darwin's popularity and respect blossomed. Evolution and natural selection quickly became the new popular topics among the many revolutionary atheist groups in Paris.

Yep. Uh-huh. Exactly how the theory of evolution came about. Just like that. (...right?)

Re: visionary science ?

We might want to know what the "Scopes Monkey Trial" was and why it was so important in the politics of the United States in the 1920s.

Well apparently there was a substitute teacher who taught at a high school in rural Tennessee. His name was John Thomas Scopes. Scopes' general appearance was long greasy hair and a long beard thin beard that fell onto his chest, making him look very much like Rasputin. He would sometimes come to school wearing strange clothing. Often dark robes with strange symbols on the front of them. Scopes took a liking to some more talented students in his biology class -- a group of three girls.

Scopes began to meet with the girls in a sporting field after school, and sometimes in unofficial secret meetings on the weekends. He began introducing the girls to radical Atheist literature coming out of liberal colleges in France. The rest of the staff at the school was unaware this was going on. One day Scopes tried to bring in other students into his secret meetings. He would open his robes, exposing pockets holding little pamphlets of various colors. And then he would whisper "Pssst .. hey kids, you wanna score some Atheism?" When scopes secret antics were finally exposed, the parents of the students, and the indeed the entire Tennessee town was appalled. Scopes was arrested. At the infamous trial, it was revealed that Scopes was telling they girls that all humans on earth had originated in the same place and had "..come from monkeys...". For his crimes, he was indicted by the jury and sentenced to 19 years in a maximum-security prison in Louisville, Kentucky.

Yeah. Yep. That is exactly what happened with the Scopes Trial. (... right?)

Last edited by hyksos on January 3rd, 2017, 5:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Re: visionary science ?

General Relativity is the most accurate theory of gravity in physics. We might ask how Albert Einstein came to develop it, and what he was thinking that led him to the theory.

Albert Einstein would go into long hiking trips into nature, always alone, and sometimes would not return for days on end. He was known to only take water with him, and no food. In the summer of 1912, Einstein ventured into a dense natural forest in the mountains around Zurich, Switzerland. This was new territory for Einstein, and also known to be risky for seasoned hikers. Nearly two weeks passed and Einstein had not returned. A rescue party was organized by the professors at Zurich Polytechnic, and included Mileva Maric (Einstein's wife at the time). Albert was quickly found in a cave not far from the road, indicating that he was not lost in woods, but was there on purpose. His medical condition was dire. He was emaciated and half-delerious. The rescuers recalled that Albert kept shouting or moaning strange phrase in his delirium. Something about "spacetime" and "... curved... curved... " , he kept saying.

Littered throughout the cave were long, flat pieces of granite, which apparently Einstein had been carving strange equations into them. Nobody could read them, and some conjectured they could have only been written by extra-terrestrial aliens. Years later, the "Einstein Granite Equations" were investigated by mathematician Karl Schwarzschilde. He recognized them as metric tensors. Schwarzchilde's student suggested that Einstein may have been working on a theory of gravity. Nearly 30 years passed before physicists could decipher the true meaning of the granite slabs.

So yeah, that's just exactly how General Relativity came about. Yep. Right?

Re: visionary science ?

Quantum theory was developed starting from theories of Max Planck. Planck was one of the earliest proponents of theory of photons, a theory that suggested light is composed of discrete packets of energy. What was Planck doing that led him to these conclusions?

Planck's early career was plagued by heavy abuse of laudanum. After a vacation to Hong Kong, Planck had turned to smoking opium. There, in the opium dens, Planck began to abuse a tonic (popular among Chinese prostitutes) that was a mixture of quinine and coca leaves, which contains cocaine. One evening after a long 'bender' Max was taken to a hospital in Shenzhen by a Chinese woman named Chun Li. Li was the proprietor of a hotel in Shatou district of Shenzhen. Planck had gone into cardiac arrest, but was revived and later recovered.

Returning to Berlin, Planck complained of headaches and other visual disturbances. The following year, Planck began to claim that he could see "auras" around people, and that he could slow down time enough to see light "propagating through the very fabric of space". He wrote several letters to friends in which referred to the "...those corpuscles of light which I alone can perceive".

And that's how the theory of photons was born. Yep. Just like that. ...right..?

Re: visionary science ?

So the Higgs Boson was recently discovered in experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The existence of the boson was actually predicted , on paper at least, by physicists as early as the 1960s. Among those were Francois Englert (France), Tom Kibble (UK), and American, Peter Higgs. We might ask what Dr. Higgs had been doing that led him to his theory.

In an interview with a BBC correspondent, Dr. Higgs explained his methods for scientific discovery.

I do my best work in long, romantic getaways. I like vacation spots surrounded by the beauty of nature. I leave with Misses Universe to a chalet in the snow-covered mountains of Colorado. That's where we can be alone together. We Relax in the hot tub, maybe with a bottle of wine -- dry off in the warm glow of the fireplace.. and go wherever the evening takes us.

Peter Higgs then leaned into the interviewer and in a soft voice..

...and sometimes if I get lucky, Lady Cosmos will slip under the sheets with me and whisper her secrets into my ear.

So yeah. That's pretty much exactly how progress is made in the discipline of Theoretical Physics. Just like that. Taking the romantic getaway in the mountains with Miss Cosmos. Yep. Sure....

Re: visionary science ?

Well the Darwin bit is dead wrong. There are enough biographies of Darwin plus a book on his misc letters to other people (written by his son), and I have read them including the historical novel by Irving Stone, to put that one to bed as pure fantacy.

Re: visionary science ?

Dr. David Obladder lived on a one-way, dead-end street and was sitting in his outhouse one night and had a vision of Nothing. He grabbed some nearby paper and scribbled this cosine equation that begins at zilch, as does all of its derivatives, proving that something can come from nothing.

He also inferred opposite waves, which satisfied an anti-something to carry on the zero-sum. The wave frequency indicated energy and the wave length provided for extension into dimension. The wave amplitude indicated charge.

The waves became protons and the wave envelopes became electrons. Photons became of an electron and a positron living in peace because they were 180 degrees out of phase.

He then ran out of paper, but he was done, both in the outhouse and with the equation. He had nothing but the equation of everything for eternity written on toilet paper.

Re: visionary science ?

And let's not forget what David did with that paper after having scrawled all of the Universe's secrets on it...lol.

It was worthless because no one would ever believe it. What a waste..lol. David eventually wasted away himself, which is a terrible thing, because David was once a great Mime during his youth. And to this very day many still say: How sad.. because a good Mime is a terrible thing to waste.

Re: visionary science ?

The cave is a metaphor for the dark places in the brain where the recollections of the collective nature of discovery can not be accessed by the genius. Just like the forgotten soldiers who goes nameless while the generals name lives on in stone most science heros are just the tip of the spear driven ahead by the forgotten and unknowable generations that preceded them.

Re: visionary science ?

(Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858.[2] This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. - Wiki )

Wallace is said to have suffered a fever while in a village named Dodinga on Halmahera, a remote Indonesian island, in 1858. ‘With such thoughts tormenting him- and in a “cold fit,” wrapped in a blanket despite an ambient temperature of eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit (31.1 degrees Celsius) - he stated that somehow he was led to think of the “positive checks” described by Thomas Malthus, whose work he had not recalled until that moment. Malthusian checks on population growth- war, famine, disease, infertility- also applied to animal populations. In the space of two hours that elapsed between the onset of chills and their subsidence in a pool of sweat, Wallace said that he had devised the entire theory of natural selection, which despite physical exhaustion, he sketched out that same evening. It was a spark of inspiration that brought together years of experience and contemplation.’https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zeN ... &q&f=false page 144.